UN expert urges to recognize hostage-taking as crime against humanity News
UN expert urges to recognize hostage-taking as crime against humanity

A UN expert urged states to recognize hostage-taking as a crime against humanity on Thursday. The statement comes as a preparatory committee is drafting a treaty on crimes against humanity.

The Special Rapporteur on torture, Alice Jill Edwards, called on states participating in the negotiations to include hostage-taking as a crime against humanity in the draft treaty, calling the lack of such designation “a major oversight.”

In the statement, Edwards said that hostage-taking has been increasingly common as a tactic to negotiate for political, financial or military benefits. In a February 2025 report to the UN Human Rights Council, Edwards documented various forms and incidents of hostage-taking, including the Houthi’s targeting of humanitarian workers in Yemen, Hamas’s hostage-holding throughout the Israel-Gaza war following their October 7 attack and abductions, Russia’s hostage-taking to intimidate the occupied populations in Ukraine, and arbitrary detentions of foreign nationals as a means to leverage political benefits.

Hostage-taking is a crime at international law. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and customary international humanitarian law prohibit hostage-taking. It is also forbidden by the International Convention against the taking of hostages. The 2025 UN General Assembly also recognized that hostage-taking may constitute a distinct form of torture under the UN Convention against Torture, which defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person.” As Edwards argued, hostage-taking can prolong abuses, detentions and violence. States must therefore recognize hostage-taking as a stand-alone crime to ensure accountability. 

The draft convention, if adopted, will allow states to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of hostage-taking under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Without this treaty, states can only prosecute crimes when they are committed within their territories. States may also exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction if the perpetrators or the victims are their nationals. Draft Article 7 extends states’ jurisdiction to prosecute or extradite an alleged perpetrator present in their territory, even if they did not commit the crime in their territory. This treaty-based universal jurisdiction has been narrowly adopted to tackle serious international crimes, such as torture, enforced disappearance, and war crimes.

In 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution to establish a preparatory committee and a working group to finalize the draft convention for states’ negotiation between 2028 and 2029. While approximately 100 states support the resolution led by Mexico and the Gambia, a smaller number of states–including China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and Eritrea–claimed that the conclusion of a treaty is premature at this stage.

As the preparatory work is underway, the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls also called for the recognition of gender apartheid as a crime against humanity on January 19.

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